tell me the average temperature of the whole earth fell by half a degree last yearõ÷zhdx ú ú ú e the ipc see. as you probably know, it is made of over a thousand of the

world's best of dates. they were rightly awarded the nobel peace prize, the announced efforts. importantly, they regard climate change as real, their findings were taken by world leaders, so much so, they were used to frame legislation to the end of the century. the other agencies are prepared to hold grand meetings and copenhagen and then agree, 40 or more years, the assumption is global heating is so serious that expensive action is needed now if we are to avoid damaging

climate change affecting our children and grandchildren. obviously it will be the cool spell indicating they have overestimated climate change. i think that instead they have underestimated the severity of global heating, mainly because they paid too much attention to human factors to industrial and domestic pollution, they have not enough attention to the earth's response to what we are doing. this is going to be the subject of my talk this evening. when i look at climate change from the point of view of our planet rather than the human viewpoint, i see that report as the scariest official document i

have ever read. the earth does not just passively accept what we do, it responds to climate change and that response is more deadly than the small changes we have made. because these responses are beginning to happen, the desert and forests and on the ocean surface, the oceans are 70% of the surface of the earth, and most importantly, all far away from cities where we live. the isolated climate environment, cool in summer, which is another reason we don't notice the changes that are happening. when i read the reports, they give me an apocalyptic view of the future. in this century, faced with ever

diminishing food and water, increasingly intolerable climate. i did not notice this grim view of our? future shared by those eminent climate scientists, j. harrison. you may well ask, how have we scientists led this potentially disastrous future creep up on us unawares. there are several reasons for this, and among them is, i think, our success at solving the important but much more manageable -- ozone depletion, which happened 10 or 20 years ago. i suspect this gave us false confidence in our ability to deal with a far greater and more complex danger of global heating ahead. i was made aware of this very personally when at a meeting on

paris on climate change a couple years ago, i found myself sitting next to someone i thought i recognized, he turned to me and said i know you, don't i? he said i am mario marino, one of the nobelists in the depletion story. we both started talking about climate change, and agreed, what a pity there weren't just six firms in the world in bidding carbon dioxide that could easily be encouraged not to do so. the ozone problem was so much easier. another reason for letting the disastrous future steel up on us is the division of science itself into numerous unconnected specialties. climate science is almost wholly concerned with atmospheric physics and chemistry. the leading part of the earth, the natural ecosystems of the

forests, the tundra and so on, are almost wholly in the process of biology, these two great divisions of science don't speak the same language. this has led to the deplorable separation of the assessment of the earth between two different international bodies, one dealing with physical science and the other with the biology, the millennium ecology assessment commission. the earth itself, of course, is not divided. as long as we treat it as two separate entities, the g is fear, and the biosphere for life, we will fail to understand our planet. if it were just a matter of devising a common language for science, we might by now have a true heir system or the gaia

approach. there's another division that prevents understanding, and that is the old one between theory and practice. the discovery of the development of powerful computers has made it ever easier to build apparently realistic simulations of the earth, its climate and its ecosystem, and it becomes all too tempting to believe that the computer model is the real world, and that the hard, down-to-earth effort of gathering data by going out on -- into tropical forests, is much less needed. we should have been warned in the first inexcusable error in the 1918s during the ozone affair. modelers were so short that their virtual worlds were real that they ignored facts about

the mission's the-it was not until two scientists looked up into the sky with a simple hand-held spectrometer that the hole in the ozone layer was seen and only then did we realize how serious was ozone depletion. now, a wholly and prevent the deadly hole has appeared in the floating ice in the arctic ocean, and this has not been learned. in earlier times, these deficiencies were merely a part of the natural history of science. now they seriously interfere with our ability to understand the earth at a time when we badly need to do so.

the consequences of adding greenhouse gases to the air, just as important, the consequences of removing natural forests to make farmland to feed ourselves because each of these facts disables the earth system's capacity to regulate itself. i like to think of us as like someone who smokes cigarettes for 30 years and now suffers a persistent cough, it is getting rather late to do anything about it. if the climate models are unreliable, how can the shore about the climate ten years from now, still less by the end of the century. the simple answer is the we can't be sure. the failure is so great that the iecc is even failing to predict what is happening to the climate

now, this year. this dark view was first put forward and reenforced two years ago by the publication by a group of scientists of a comparison of high quality measurements of what is really happening to the earth, and the model of predictions of the ipcc. i can show you this. my first slide. if i can get it to work. here we are. that graph on the display their shows you time on the bottom going left to write, going from 1993 to 2005 or 2006. the straight line, the actual

data, averaging line, is what sea level is actually rising as seen by observers. the green zone down below is what the ipcc is predicting will be happening. as you can see straight away, the sea level is rising much more, about twice as fast as even the gloomiest of the ipcc models predict. of course, that melting of ice led to this hole that i mentioned, if i can get it. there we are.

the solid line, the black, thick line shows the extra amount of what scientists call the anomaly, of ice that was covering the north polar ocean. in the beginning of the chart in 1978, nearly all of the polar ocean was covered with ice in the summer time. gradually, as time has gone by, first it began to fall slightly, then round about the turn of the century, somewhere in the mid 90s, began to move faster. in 2007, it had gone right down, the bottom was falling out, the ice in the polar regions, we had a great big hole in the north of the world. you can imagine what a businessman would think about that if that sort of charge represented the health of his

firm. and actually, the health of the planet. it is very serious. but again, you see the red dots. this is what the ipcc were predicting would happen. they were missing that huge hole in the ice with their model. it is truly serious because when all that ice is gone, and some think it could be gone anywhere between five or 20 years, the extra heat received by the earth each year as some light falls on dark ocean rather than white reflecting ice, would be equal to almost all of the effect of what we have added to the atmosphere to date. this is why i consider the whole affair singularly serious. the earth is doing more now than

we are doing. climate scientists have had to reduce their vision of the earth to something that can be managed. they have only had time to come to terms with the gap in the atmosphere. they know the oceans, the clouds, the surface and the floating ice are all important. but still, they are only partly understood. the biosphere's reaction is completely unknown. one shouldn't be too hard on the ipcc. they haven't had a chance to come to grips with the problem of the changing earth. for the past 40 years, i have worked on a different way of looking at our planet, seeing it as a system that includes an active and responsive biosphere. this, of course, is gaia theory, this means turning away from the established science of the past

century and seeing our planet as a not completely understood form of life. if we@ú@ú billions of living cells in dynamic cooperation. climate scientists should be thinking of the earth as a collection of separate parts, not as a whole, live planet.

this is why they found it so dauntingly complex. they will remain unable to look at the future climate until they model of the earth as a single system. it is true that the ipcc's model contain parts of the biosphere but they include life as a passenger, not as a working member of the unit. it is possible to make a simple child's model of the earth's system using gaia theory. i made one in 1994 and it was published in peer review journal nature. what i did was imagine a simple planet like the earth that orbited a star like the sun and had planneds on the land and algae living in its motion. the plants and algae, removing carbon dioxide from the air, to eat the plants and out and

return the co2 in the natural balance of nature. the climate on this model is calculated from the established equations, and regulation of temperature took place as the level of co2 changed according to feedback from plant and animal growth. i tested this very simple model by adding co2 to the air above it, just as we are doing. here is the comparison of its forecasts with those of the ipcc. the solid line, which goes from

1900 to 200100 -- 2,100, the climate has done and will do as the current goes on in this century, the line that goes up and down is the prediction of the simple model that i told you. you can see straight away, it shows a different kind of picture. the seasonal affects in on the simple model, in winter and summer changes. you can see straight away, the model changes become amplified more and more. it doesn't rise slowly, it jumps suddenly, 5 degrees up and stays

there. not like the ipcc which is going on as more co2 is added. the liberty of that simple model is not very high because it does not have the professional expertise of the ipcc. how serious an issue should we take between the professional predictions and this simple, what we might call, amateur prediction? the best way to do so is to look at the earth's history. when we look back to the last time there was a jump in temperature, between 1 period and another, was of course the end of the last ice age, a mere 14,000 years ago. if you look back at the record of that change, you see a very different picture than the ipcc

act. this time, going from 15,000 years ago, up through the day, you see the change from the ice age was not a smooth, steady ride. at first it fluctuated quite wildly. it rose steeply but fell back again to even lower temperatures than before, but then quite suddenly, there was a rapid and violent jump upwards in temperature in a period when the climatologists refers to as the younger, dryer. we won't go into the details of that but i can tell you afterwards if you wish to know. this set up the simple model and

into the interiorglacial that we are now in. that is the typical history of the earth's climate change, a similar change to hot, which took place fifty-five million years ago when a relatively large quantity of co2 was released into the air by geological action. i find it extraordinary that my fellow scientists could have put their names to predictions as far ahead of the end of the century and in the face of these great uncertainties. i personally know scientists at the ipcc and some of them are close friends, and i know that they are wise, competent and principled. so what on earth made them make the wrong kind of climate model and assume that their forecasts were good enough for governments to make policy on? one answer may be that they had

no option. having persuaded governments that large and expensive modeling centers with huge computers in them, the battleships of the climate war, having persuaded them that they were needed, they just had to sail in these battleships and hope for the best. government and research agencies have spent so much money on modeling that they are cutting back funds for observation and spent instead on even more complicated computers and facilities that go with them. it may be good for the local industry around here but i am not sure it is good for the itself. i have lived long enough to see this happen. i often wonder what a modern grand agency would have done in the early nineteenth century about funding the graduate student charles darwin, who wanted to make a three year trip

around world with no particular purpose in mind. i don't think he would have gotten his funds. nature is always the final arbiter of our ideas in science, and the ideas must be tested in the real world. we must never forget the virtual worlds of models are always hypothetical until the test is made. what can we do? our minds are on the economic, but the climate crisis and are likely to be more so. the recession may be bad and a source of human misery but it will force a closer look at the conduct of science. this may also make us look more closely at extravagant attempts to improve our carbon footprint and make us wonder if those frequent code images to kyoto and so on are really needed. they do nothing for the earth,

nor does political pressure for renewable energy. which is like, rather, alternative -- is rarely a cure for serious disease. of course, we had better stop burning fossil fuel at an excessive rate and equally important, reduce the area of the natural world that we keep taking for ourself. but our main task, should global heating continue, is to adapt and prepare to survive. the earth's system, gaia, has survived far worse than we are doing to it inf industrialize fuel and will certainly save itself and it is false pride to think we can usurp that task. she has survived seven major climate christs -- crises in the

past, of this kind and we are here, right through it. we are unlikely to be made extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to a billion or less. we have to survive the stresses and hope that during the course of our adaptation it will encourage the evolution of a more capable form of human. we truly have to concentrate on saving ourselves. does this mean that there is little we can do now to prevent the earth's system moving to its stable hot state? perhaps it does but in no way do i mean that there is nothing we can do. there have been quite a lot of talk recently about gm engineering. that is too long a topic to go into but i would be glad to answer questions after my talk. by far, the most promising

approach of all that action is to use the power of the biosphere to pump co2 from the air, and then prevent the carbon that it captured from returning to the air as it does now. you see, all but 0.1% of the carbon dioxide captured by plants each year is returned to the air by animals, by us and by microorganisms that the them. plants and algae in the notion remove as much as five hundred fifty thousand million tons of carbon dioxide every year, whereas our problem is brought about by the mission of only thirty-three thousand million tons. if we could prevent the return of that carbon dioxide that has

been captured to the atmosphere, we would be in an incomparably better position. it may not be too difficult, as a start, if we could persuade farmers around most of the world to turn their waste, straw and other non edibles to their crops, into charcoal, and put it back into the soil or sand into the ocean for burial, then we could massively remove from the atmosphere enough carbon dioxide to seriously turn back climate change. it will be particularly effective if it were applied to the ocean. those are long steps into the future and the problem is do we have time to do it? perhaps our first task is to stop thinking blindly that

merely reducing our carbon footprint is all we have to do. it isn't, and we have to understand, as i said several times, that by abrading the skin of our planet, we have destroyed more than 40% of the earth's natural ecosystem, and these were what previously served to keep a siple -- stable climate. most of all, we have to understand the air system, gaia, is in positive feedback and is moving towards that stable hot state. i can't stress too strong early how serious this positive feedback. imagine for example, you are in a small wooden cabin in canada or somewhere in wintertime, and you build too large a fire to warm yourself from logs around and furniture near the fire began to smolder. if you didn't act immediately, positive feedback on the fire

system would insure that the whole house was consumed by fire within minutes. that is the type of problem we face. i will show you my last slide. this is just to reenforce the point i am making, that we don't notice what we are doing to the earth. that is a picture that comes from science magazine of new york as it is now, and that is new york, a simulation of what it looked like in 1600. it, and most of north america, had trees doing their job of regulating the climate. gradually, we are taking it all away for farmland or city, and we don't notice what we are doing. the present ipcc models, predict almost unanimously that by 2014,

the average summer in the north-central regions of the world will be as hot ,@@ will also go to canada. the chinese have the option of going to siberia if they are allowed to go there. but will there be enough food

for us all? we may have about 20 years to prepare for these events. we can't go on burning fossil fuel, but our cities need abundant electricity to survive and there are two ways to get it sensibly. one is using the one good renewable energy, the thermal energy from the hot desert regions. you have them here in arizona, calculated at a mere 100 x 100 miles square of arizona desert will produce enough their electricity to supply most of the needs of north america. it is nothing fanciful, just using mirrors to focus the sun's heat on to boilers. good old-fashioned nineteenth century engineering, but it works. the other one is nuclear-powered, of which we have plenty, and we could have a

lot more because it is immediately available. but for the political restrictions on its use, nuclear need not be looked on as a long-term solution, but it will surely get us through some of the crises of the crucial next 30 years. in france, they have run almost entirely on nuclear energy and successfully learned to deal with the waste problem and all of the other problems. i strongly advise those who doubt the value of nuclear energy to see how they are doing. perhaps the saddest thing is that if we fail and humans went extinct, gaia will lose as much or more than we do. not only will wildlife and the hole at the system -- in human civilization, our planet has a

precious resource. it is fashionable to talk about us as a disease, harm to the planet like a plague, doing nothing but damage. this is quite untrue. we also are intelligence, and communicating abilities. after all, after a 3-1/2 billion years of evolution, gaia produce an animal that is able enough to let it see itself from space and see what an extraordinarily beautiful planet it is when compared with its bid desert siblings, mars and venus. other organisms have wreaked havoc with and become a vital part of the system.

oxygen, when it was first released, was nearly as deadly as the release of chlorine now. yet over the years we have adapted to oxygen, made use of this reactive gas and even use it to drive our cars. it has taken gaia at least 3-1/2 aeons, a quarter of the age of the universe, to evolves us. and a photo synthesizers have a long time to wait before they became redwood trees. we humans have to be patient while we slowly devolve to become an integrated part of that wonderful concept of intelligent planet. what a wonderful future for us that could be. a [applause]

>> we are now ready for questions and answers. i would like to request, in order to get as many questions in as possible, if you keep your questions succinct and in the form of a question. thank you. >> my first question is, today on the radio you were asking a question about the media hypophysis a new duck that question. >> thank you. >> my second question is i totally agree with you about climate change the dud you think is the height of irresponsibility to tie it to such a far-fetched events as the chinese taking over africa as you did today? it dilutes your other message. my third question is will you agree to a debate with me anytime, anyplace? thank you. >> thank you. i would very much like a proper

discussion with you on the media hypophysis, but i don't think this is the time for it. i will be coming back to the united states in october and we must get together then. [applause] >> hello. please tell me if you think it is a practical idea to take nuclear warhead fissionable material, use it for nuclear power can come undone and she did into space for the sun? >> i didn't quite hear -- what we should do with the weight? >> put them in the heads of icbms and dave them at the sun. >> i don't think we should, it

would be far too expensive to do that. my wife, sandy. the french will take you to the high-level nuclear wastes for on the north coast of france. they have stored 25 years, nuclear power stations, it is just in the hole in granite and above it is the three meter compact later to stop the radiation. we stood on it, right above that. i had a hand held radiation monitor. about the same as the background anywhere around the world away from the regions that have much more than that. isn't a problem storing nuclear

waste and the french answered that problem very well. >> i first learned about the gaia hypothesis in a book review some 25 years ago and i have bought your book and read them and greatly enjoyed them and i thank you for them, it has been thought-provoking and entertaining. as i understand the gaia hypothesis, we have gaia, a self regulating system, and the problem that you spoke to in the original gaia hypothesis was the human interference with that, cows, cars and chainsaws, and basically we screwed it up.

we have to stop screwing it up because gaia will take care of us. i have thought about that a long time and i have been reading a lot of other views about this and the thing that's strikes me, there are six recognized great extinctions from the paleolithic record, we were not around for any of them. and the katie event is the only one that appears to be definitively tied to something other than life. so if gaia is a process of life creating the conditions in which life can prosper, how do we explain these five great extinctions in which apparently life created the conditions that virtually wiped out life on the

planet? [applause] >> thank you for that question, it is a good one. i think you really have to go back to darwin for the answer to that. evolution is a lottery, in a sense, will evolve and appear. so far as the earth system is concerned, if those all >> the environment in a way that favors their progeny, and according to darwinism, they will prosper, conversely, if they affect their environment in a way that lessens their progeny, they're likely to go extinct. when this sort of local event is applied to the whole planet, one gets quite complex interactions

with the old system. that simple model diagram, because the system has inherent in it a lot of positive feedback, then affects become amplified. that is what leads to the sudden jumps. but always correction occurs and stabilization takes place. after a hundred billion years of life on the planet, a tribute to its success. [applause] >> what do you think of the global dimming theory? >> it is often forgotten that

when you burn coal, and not only puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it also puts a lot of sulphur gas into the atmosphere. the sulphur gases tend to form aerosols, mostly sulfuric acid, that float around in the atmosphere. at this university, i was told long time ago, if you go out in an airplane war on a beautiful clear sunny day when the sky is pure blue, by the time you get up to 5,000 feet, everywhere below you, that is global dimming, and that haze is pollution haze that is reflecting sunlight back to space, so it causes quite a bit of cooling of the earth. burning coal is cooling as well as heating the earth. the problem here is if you stop

burning coal suddenly, all over the planet, it will get hot enough -- not cooler, because this would hang around in the air for 100 years but the a's would drop out in a matter of months. the son's heat will come in uninterrupted and blanket the co2 and cause more heat. it is a serious business. is not only coal burning, but biomass in forests and places like indonesia, all add to it. >> there's something very evident in the human psyche that people haven't even begun to clean up the mess, a very toxic

products heading for the columbia river, the u.s. government wants to make that another dump site about the united states, it is not even handle. i can see the french may have some kind of capability of dealing with this correctly. perhaps you can -- helping with our government, it still doesn't seem, given the reality in eastern washington, extremely toxic spots that give off high levels of radiation, people are using any kind of wisdom to use nuclear energy. >> there is not a lot i can say from what i just said a few minutes ago about the french experience. it is a problem that can be solved by regular engineering and sensible use. but it is incensed with all kinds of legislation put in

place, largely from unreasoning produced, and the nuclear came out by far the safest of energy sources. that is even including that. ..

that for the earth to maintain an equilibrium we would have to shrink the amount of farmland we have and the amount of cities but especially farm land and the tree plantations, things like that. how do you think we can feed ourselves while vastly shrinking the amount of cultivated land and returning that to a natural state? >> i don't think -- that's why i take -- there is not a lot we can do about it except adapting

to the changes that are coming such as moving will to places that will stay cool, and habitable. i don't think we can stop it by howarth for you going to persuade the people in what used to be called the third world to stop producing farmland by cutting down forests and so on, i don't think it is possible to do it and certainly not in time. thank you very much, dr. lovelock. i recognize you as a medical doctor and as such when i heard from you tonight was looking at the patient as a living organism and not a set of molecules and chemicals. and minerals, was basically taking that approach. as such we have had the psychology now for 65 years as a field and many of those early

scientists came out of the background of natural history which you alluded to as a natural component in monitoring what is happening in climate change. i am curious why those ideas haven't been at the ipcc table. that is my first question and second you suggested the solar thermal in desert was a potential solution to the climate change problem and that certainly seems to make sense in an area you are having increasing desert location if you are observing the excess light to produce energy in the sense modulate conditions the question on that one is why do you think that technology has not seen more development since its 30 years of proven systems out there? >> can i answer the second question first?

this goes outside my area of expertise as a scientist but i get a strong impression humans are doomed to continue business as usual regardless and if you set up a business making wind turbines for example and the government is prepared to pay large subsidies for doing so and give huge tax breaks you go on doing it regardless. you would say we will be better to use thermal energy, you will go on making wind turbines and as well as money flows you will do well and everybody will profit and i think it is factors like that but as i say i am estranged from my area of expertise. that is only an opinion. >> and the first question? >> sorry, i've already forgotten age is creeping on me. [laughter] >> as a doctor looking at treating the patient why is it

that the slices of the cultists and those who have been bred in the field of natural history and observation not been at the table and part of the climate modeling conversations? >> i didn't quite get -- could you put it in simple terms? >> it seems like what you said is the physical scientists who have been the one involved in climate forecasting and why have the ecologists which look up the dam amex between the physical environment and living systems, why have they not been reading alternative model or some way participating that conversation? >> it is because neither of them want to learn the expertise of the other. you won't get many physicists wanting to become psychologists or go and try to put into their marbles. they don't do it with the understanding of a good

ecologists or biologist and vice versa, you won't find many ecologists at least i've never found them that are happy to go and deal with the complexities of climate science, geophysics. and i think it is science there is just so much information to handle it has to divide up into all of these specialities and they just don't talk to each other and you almost need a new approach altogether. the best hope i think is you have the same problem -- if you have something wrong with your left foot you don't go to a gynecologist especially if you are a male. [laughter] but science is a bit like that. there are not in the general practitioners that can lead you from one to another and we have got to be in science beginning

to introduce a general list as well as specialist. >> hello. i wanted to ask your opinion on injecting a certain quantity of air assault into the upper atmosphere or stopgap measure. >> if you want a temporary relatively execution of global warming one way of doing is certainly is to inject into the upper atmosphere the stratosphere some sulfur compound that will produce aerosol up there. indeed the experiment has already been done. when the volcano in the philippines erupted in 1991i think it was it injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and that stopped global warming

for three years running and now 20 million tons sounds a lot but it isn't that much. it would be feasible for the airlines if they carried a ton of sulfur compound on every flight across the atlantic and pacific and so on in the course of a reasonable time to cut of as much as 20 million tons of sulfur compound and you have got a game, too. sulfur dioxide weighs twice as much as sulfur itself so if you took out pure silver into the atmosphere you would only need 10,000, 10 million tons. i think it's feasible. the problem here is all the way would work, it's a bit like when your kidneys fail going on dialysis. it will buy you time but it is not a cure in any sense of the board but on the other hand if your kidneys suddenly feel he would never refuse dialysis because death is the alternative

>> i wanted to come back to your illustration that had the seasonal fluctuations and then suddenly jumping up to a new level. as we have looked back on the drought records of the last 40 years something very much like that is seen in retrospect the global drought normally about 15% of the earth's surface in serious drought this is back in the 1950's to 1982 just hover around 15%. 1982 it took a jump up 24% and stayed there for 15 years. and then in 97 with the big on the new it jumped up 33% and stayed five or six years and has come down slow. so these kind of sudden changes were just into a whole new ball game in terms of how the

atmospheric and oceanographic circulation works is the kind of threat that i think we will have to cope with much sooner than a gradual creepo for example as to say and the european summer of 2003 the job in the northern swiss temperatures was six standard deviations and was not a gradual because the next highest was back and the 1940's so these kind of things show there are other ways of doing things and you can get into a condition you can pop into them and then hope you can pop back. >> i agree with what you say and thank you for saying it. yes, i like to compare the future more like the shape of a

mountain with its foothills and deep valleys going out whereas they tend to have a highway that goes up over the path as with no variation. it is much more the one you just mentioned. >> sir i would like to ask about to trends people consider frightful with the melting of the arctic ocean they seem to be less discussed now. one is of course the destruction, the tropical rain forest, and that's impact by itself and secondly the idea that with green land ice cap melting there would be more fresh water that would cause the divergent of the gulf stream and would cause cooling of the european area and a few years

ago people were concerned about both of those and now people don't seem to be discussing them as much. do you have any comment about those? >> thank you. well, it may be news to you but last year the gulf stream did appear to disappear. the fact that the gulf of mexico temperatures were 8 degrees cooler than usual was one indication. we found in europe the temperatures to the west of northern europe were far lower than normal and everything fits with a picture the north atlantic circulation system had temporarily gone into and i think there are those who think that the melting of the ice, floating ice in the arctic ocean had some connection with this event. after all the circulation is driven by the sinking of salt

water which is a form that comes up from the south and when it reaches the northern region it cools off and its density because it contains it causes it to sink if you inject a large amount of fresh water into this it throws a monkey wrench into the circulation system and maybe that happened. the good thing about it if it is a good thing is the cooling was no where the mayor as europe as dramatic as expected and i understand this is largely a consequence of the fact that most of the heat attributed to the north atlantic gulf stream is carried by the atmosphere and not by the ocean 75% is atmospheric and only 25% oceanic so it is a real effect but is not as noticeable as it might -- you might think it would be.

>> -- the impact of the destruction of the tropical forest -- in its own problem for the world. >> i couldn't agree more. it intimately involved with climate regulation in their region and with the whole world and it's not only the tropical forest one should think also the great forest of canada and siberia. they play a huge part in the system but the most important thing everybody forgets and is never mentioned is the ocean itself. the surface of the ocean which covers 70% of the earth as it warms it becomes a desert quite simply because the top layer stratus fis warm water floating on cold and nutrient filled water below and nothing will break that, destabilize except a hurricane, that does it

temporarily. now, that area of ocean density steadily increasing year by year and is part of all@@@ú@ú@p,ñ ú j is around 11,000 years. now, 13,000 years ago we had 40 some odd floods to 800 feet deep

at hanford. now, i don't have any great faith that over a 10,000 year pogo for example we could have much better luck selecting a place to store this anywhere in the world and also i don't have all that much faith in humankind or concrete to withstand on the part of the concrete just failure from five nuclear radioactivity and the people's fascination with using nuclear waste to make a dirty bomb to get something from somebody else. now, can you tell me something that would cause me to have more faith in the advisability of such a program?

[applause] i would advise you strongly not to worry about the danger of nuclear waste and worry more about the danger of climate change. that is the real problem that will kill us. [applause] >> if i might further observed about, call with 500 years ago we started burning coal. it's taken 500 years to learn what was wrong with doing that my would suggest we don't have that many years to learn what is wrong with using nuclear power. [applause] >> we have time for about two more questions. >> i can see the value of having particular to the atmosphere for

reflecting sunlight but i'm wondering if sulfur is the best choice. doesn't that fallout as an acid and contribute to the acidification of fresh water and the oceans? >> the answer to that one is quite simple. the quantity of sulfur involved in the stratosphere for reflecting sunlight back to space, 20 million tons is quite trivial compared with the fallout of acid rain around the world from coal burning generally. no, it is not a real big problem, that one. but what is a problem of course is the sea is growing more acid as a result of carbon dioxide to solving it. it is a much weaker asset sulfurous acid but there's much more of it and one of the sad consequences of the ever-increasing amount of co2 in the notion is that shell four

main coal organisms are finding it more and more difficult to do their job and if the shell forming organisms ceased to do their job, then the results could be done. >> in your talking mentioned there are options one may want to consider and you promised to talk about them, so i am now asking the question. >> they have already been talked about to some extent. we talked about sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere as a way of producing an aerosol that would reflect sunlight. a very similar idea is the production of artificial marine stratus clouds by spraying see walter from floating mechanisms and this has been put forward by i think it is john latham and

also with somebody in britain and i think it is a feasible idea and rather like the stratospheric aerosols is something that would buy time and this is something we badly need, so i am sort of more towards giglio engineering and something we might have to do but it's not going to be the answer. >> i thought he would mention something about the artificial fertilization of the desert parts of the ocean to that aspect. >> i thought putting iran in the ocean to encourage growth, i felt, and i may be wrong on this, had recently been tried rather extensively and has been shown to work insufficiently as the promise of was felt in the early days of that idea. it is a nice idea but i think the tests have suggested it is

not quite good enough to work. [applause] [applause]